How 20th Century Has Changed Vocal Techniques

Bethan Exelby

How did we come to Contemporary Vocal Music as it is today?
An exploration of how the 20th Century has changed vocal techniques.

Contemporary Music is a time in classical music history in which all previously set boundaries were pushed and broken in order to discover new things, new sounds, and new ways of doing things. This is all evident when looking at contemporary vocal music.

Before the Contemporary era, a vocal performer would only sing or speak. Europe was at the forefront of singing technique with the Italian Bel Canto school, teaching an expressive style of singing most associated with opera. The school itself died out in the mid 19th Century but its style and ideals were continued in vocal performance into the 20th Century.

In the 20th Century, Composer began testing the boundaries in music in all senses, exploring everything from tonality to structure to performance and instrumental techniques. The exploration of vocal techniques has potentially been the most lucrative in discover extended instrumental techniques.
“Extended vocal technique is in some ways entirely self-descriptive - it extends the boundaries of what most would consider a normal singing technique to include (potentially) any and all the sounds
K. Halfyard considers Meredith Monk to be the most significant performer of Extended Vocal Techniques. Monk is both a performer and composer of contemporary vocal music famed mostly for her work with extended vocal techniques. A distinguished soloist with a long list of accomplishments, Monk has been working within Contemporary Music from the late 1960s and is still working today. A lot of her explorative work has been building upon and running parallel to the work of the European composers of the 1960s, creating her own “distinctive idiom” with her voice and compositions. Monk has explored in depth Extended Vocal Techniques within ensemble singing, something which her European contemporaries steered clear